Charles_F_Bell wrote:Janet Taylor-Perry wrote:Dirk, in your example, the -ing verb is preferable. I think what you need to avoid are the was/were...ing verbs. She was standing in the rain vs she stood in the rain.
Sure, but that does not give any reason for preferring [comma] participle rather than the verb itself not in past-progressive tense like dove which preceded it in simple past tense.
Like our other Janet, are you thinking one can merely replace the was before the -ing word with a comma?
No, I'm not. She laughed hard, shaking her shoulders. Shaking makes this an adjective clause. She laughed, shook her shoulders. This is just bad grammar. Shook here is a verb showing action. If you use a participle like this at the end of a sentence, it needs to be -ing. At the beginning, either can be used so long as the -ed verb describes rather than showing action. At the beginning, -ing should show action.
Shaking her head, she laughed loudly.
Drenched in booze, the man staggered across the room.
Of your examples, I would not author either of them. As to style, it is as taken as good form to avoid -ing words as it is to avoid passive tense and weak, vague, or useless adverbs and adjective for the reason that it weighs down the narration and numbs the mind when done to excess. In Dirk's example, my toleration for -ing words is one per page, probably lower than for most people, but in one sentence he had three in rapid succession. That is bad writing yet easily fixable.
The alternate choice in your example is either putting the participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence as Dirk did and like you did in the second version, or and shook her shoulders. However, in the scenario Janet R created, laughed and shaking her head are simultaneous actions so only the first choice is logical - there being no reason at all to dangle that phrase at the end of the sentence.
